About Me

Professional nerd. Linux, open source, and devops enthusiast with nearly 20 years of industry experience. I love coming up with creative solutions to complex problems. Check out my site at https://vancluevertech.com, or follow me on Twitter at @vancluever. You can also check out my GitHub at https://github.com/vancluever.

Nerd stuff from the left coast of Canada

xauth

X11 forwarding comes in handy from time to time. For example, say you want to use virt-manager to work with KVM VMs on your lab machine but want to do it from your Mac (ahem).

Yeah, if you didn’t gather it already, by “you”, I mean “me”. 😉

The one main issue with this very specific above scenario is that virt-manager will more than likely require some sort of root-level privileges, and neither the ~/.Xauthority file, nor the DISPLAY or XAUTHORITY environment variables survive sudo escalation.

The manual fix is pretty easy though. Before escalation, run xauth list to get the session data.